Do You Make These 4 Mistakes When Explaining Cryptocurrency to Newcomers? | DASH: Detailed

Johnson And you're watching DASH: Detailed Sometimes when a person is quite knowledgeable about a topic it becomes difficult for them to then explain that to others who don't know as much or anything about it at all As you are among the early adopters of what is potentially going to be the future of money, you have the grand opportunity of imparting your not only your enthusiasm but also your understanding to anybody else who asks And if you haven't had curious people ask you about your interests yet, you likely will as cryptocurrency becomes more and more discussed on a global scale

With that said, here are four mistakes to avoid Number one: using the word “cryptocurrency” Yes I have used it with you now, it's in the title of this video, but that's because I know who my audience is And if you're talking to someone who isn't already knowledgeable about these things the word “cryptocurrency” not only gives them nothing that they can work with – crypt? What, like the crypt keeper? Crypt What's crypt? But it also just makes it sound foreign and unapproachable

As an example I used this word myself one time with a curious person and then I said, 'Kind of like digital currency' And they said, “Oh, digital currency I know what both of those words mean That's much better" And it is much better

So, number one, scratch the word “cryptocurrency” and use digital currency or digital money or like in Dash, digital cash Number two: Avoid using buzzwords like disruptive and trustless and permissionless and these other things which don't actually give any immediate meaning to your listener but probably just create even more questions for them For example, back when I was a PR blogger for a day job I had a client who was trying to launch an encrypted cloud service and it was my job to write the text for his website And because the encryption process made the data being stored, you know, like inaccessible to this guy – to the business owner – I thought, 'Oh, ok, we can pitch that his service is trustless, right?' Like no one has to trust that he won't look at their data So I wrote these text pieces for his website using the word trustless and he wrote back to me saying that he found that word upsetting because it sounded like it was a service that could not be trusted

It was without trust And so, just buzzwords in general that are totally up to interpretation and may land with your listener in any sort of random way no Steer clear Number three: Define the jargon terms you're going to use for your listener because newcomers do not know what a blockchain is, what a miner is, what a node is, what, I mean consensus even should be defined, certainly they don't know what a confirmation is, or a block reward or any of these things And it can be so tempting to use these terms without defining them because of course, you know what they mean

You have the problem of knowledge And your crypto compatriots know what they mean But in my experience, it helps so much to define these terms first because otherwise a person is left feeling like: “Oh, I should know what that means That because the person describing it to me didn't define it, I should know what that means Hence I am hopelessly out of the loop and I ought to just steer clear of this digital currency thing altogether because clearly I'm not hip enough to understand

” As examples: A blockchain can be easily defined as a ledger or a record of ownership A miner can be defined as a person who's computer uses math to ensure that the record of ownership is accurate And from that point a confirmation can then be defined as a periodic time when all miners agree that previous transfers of ownership are accurate And number four: Mention the reason that Satoshi invented blockchain-based digital currency in the first place Many, or even most people you talk to will likely be perfectly happy if not content with the way their finances currently run

Their credit card works Their paper money works Maybe they use checks – their checks work And for this reason, there may not be an initial compelling selling point to digital currency Until you mention that in the first block ever mined in Bitcoin Satoshi embedded a message that said that yet another bank bailout was taking place

And unfortunately more and more people are starting to have the experience of what it is like to have a real bank bailout or bank bailin effect them and their family and their retirement savings and the value of their home and all of these sorts of things And that is what really strikes at the core of what it is you want to talk to them about in the first place Which is to say that – as Satoshi mentioned in his white paper – when all transactions are made public, or when there is a publicly-verifiable ledger of ownership – when all transactions are announced – people and institutions cannot be secretly insolvent In other words, Satoshi saw the cause of banking crises as being secret ledgers of ownership and so he created the first open ledger of ownership So with these four pointers: Don't use the word cryptocurrency Don't use buzzwords Define your jargon before you use it and Talk about Satoshi hello! you are going to find yourself in some excellent conversations I believe and as a final message to you I find the best conversation starters can be visual which is to say swag which is to say t-shirts

Oh wow, it's Pete! And we have made these Dash digital cash t-shirts and are selling them And I'm wearing a small Pete's wearing a large We have all the way up to extra large as well, and of course medium And they say “Dash

org” on the back And of course they're like normal t-shirts with sleeves like this, as you can see, I modified with scissors because I like to do that to my t-shirts And we are selling these t-shirts for two Dash only Best Price

Out there And if you would like one – I want you to have one – send an email to [email protected] with your size – any size from small to extra large – and your shipping address And I will send you back the payment address and the shipping price So that and two Dash will get you a neat t-shirt! And this has been DASH: Detailed, thanks for watching

But still, given the benefit of the doubt, let us assume that all miners were major stakeholders, still, how can they know what a majority of coin-holding users thinks is best? In the Dash network cryptography has been used to solve this problem in a way that was just implemented last year with a feature that developer Evan Duffield has called the “Decision-Making Engine”

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